My STALKER: Anomaly playthrough is progressing at the typically languid pace. As soon as I find a scoped shotgun for Hip’s quest I can start thinking about migrating my base of operations a bit north. For a Loner run this would be prime time to setup in Rostok, but Mercenaries aren’t on friendly terms with Duty so that’s out. I’ll have to make it to Dead City probably and that will be quite a trek. I probably have to wait until I find and repair a better suit. And also hope my companions don’t die on me as I need them to haul over all my collected shit in my stash.
I’ve also been playing Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. Yes it’s a gacha game (don’t buy any currency to gamble) and yes the character designs are unfortunately a bit too gooneriffic, and yes the story is pretty bad and the translation is pure Google Translate level machine-translated slop. But you know what? The actual gameplay of the roguelike deckbuilder portion is actually very fun. Tons of customisation with an incredibly mutable deckbuilder that has tons of variations for every single card. Even the balance is surprisingly good, with such endless possibilities in combos and specific versions of specific cards that you can make pretty much any character shine with enough work on finding just the right decks and setups. Don’t know if it will stick, and I’ll keep an eye on balance going forward to see if they start making it more pay-to-win, but for now I’m having a surprisingly good time with it.
Bg3. I think the flaws are glaringly obvious and everyone has heard them already (inventory, everything after act 1, the main characters being generally gross) it’s just whether they’re a deal breaker for you personally. For me they are, especially inventory.
Same. I tried to just ‘go with it’ and ignore the flaws so that I could play multi-player with my SO. Act 2 was a slog. Act 3 is where we gave up completely. The only good part is that the whiny companions started dying on their own.
My favourite part of returning to camp was lying to gale that I’d found no magical items while having 4 characters invs basically overflowing with items I didnt want.
Wyll is the least immediately unlikeable but he’s boring and I hated talking to him
Laezel, shadow - clearly intended to parallel each other but listening to hard-headed morons clash between “we should murder everything” and “those people need medicine and my only medicine is pain” is not entertaining to me. Their “growth” doesn’t ever seem to fix this
Karlach I don’t have real complaints about
Gale never managed to grow out of being pompous and annoying
Dark urge probably the biggest character
There’s plenty of listicles and reddit posts with other complaints if you google “don’t like bg3 characters”.
I had the same feeling, didnt really like the characters they were weird but after modding some custom ones in I enjoyed it a lot more. I did keep astrlas ans shadow heart then put my own two characters to fill the party.
For the Chaz’s coronation day they closed the food banks, and pre-arrested a bunch of peaceful protesters (released without charge afterward the event).
It goes the old telltale way of presenting fake choices that dont really matter because the optional character are being written out of team scenes mostly, one romance option is completely ignored because the devs clearly favoured the other and put her in every scene and the dispatching minigame they advertised the game with has absolutely 0 impact on anything. You could fail every dispatch, only do the mandatory ones and nothing would change.
The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn’t enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn’t sit with me. I haven’t tried Dark Ages but it seems like it’s doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.
I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing. I think it’s brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.
Both of your comments are a testament to why I love the new Doom games – they’re different and don’t seem to be meant to be enjoyed by every fan, every release, every time.
Apart from the first two games (and Doom 64 for that matter), each offers different gameplay and feel and it’s so, so beautiful.
I feel lucky having a blast in each one. Doom 3 is my favorite, actually, especially with the vanilla flashlight (for the uninitiated: where you can either have your weapon out or the flashlight).
Yeah. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I got into it and finished it. Once I realized that you’re expected to die and respawn frequently, and you don’t lose anything when you do, playing went a lot better.
I still don’t get that decision, because Doom has never been like that. Even arcade games don’t do that. It just felt trivially cheap at that point.
Yeah, I enjoyed a bit of 2016, but got bored a didn’t finish it. I think Doom Eternal I had from Steam Family Sharing (or other source I didn’t pay for) and just couldn’t get into it. I hate both of them forcing the melee kill thing that takes you out of the action to watch a cutscene, but Eternal just didn’t feel like it worked for some reason.
I love everything about ‘Disco Elysium’ in isolation. Art style? Gorgeous. Grimy noiry mood, right up my alley. I love isometric RPGs, though it’s been a while since I played any. Writing is great, from what I’ve heard. Novel mechanics, probably beautiful.
Only, I get into a couple dialogs and realize I need a second computer on the desk, to type up notes. Ain’t no way I’m remembering any of that, especially since I tend to take long breaks in a playthrough. And I just decided in recent years that I need to pay closer attention to stories in games, which I neglected to do back in my youth.
I’ve put twenty notes into the phone (with swipe-typing, thankfully), and that ended my initial experience.
You’re playing a middle aged detective (though he looks older, or at least more worn down) who just woke up from an alcoholic coma after taking all the drugs, unable to remember anything about himself or the world he lives in, except for the fact that there might have been a woman, which was somehow both the best and the worst, and possibly some trivia about disco.
I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to remember or understand everything the game throws at you, at least on a first playthrough. That’s what Kim is for.
Just go with the flow, and remember that in this game failure often leads to more enjoyable outcomes than success.
But he’s a professional detective, presumably with the skill to gather information and put it together. Meanwhile I’m a professional scatterbrain who writes down notes for programming projects that take more than a day. It would be unrealistic for me to roleplay as him, especially if I step away from the game for a couple weeks and forget most of the details. If I can code while hungover, he probably can do detective stuff while hungover.
He was a professional detective. You know, before he erased his brain with massive quantities of alcohol and drugs.
It’s up to you to decide who he is now.
Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau, reincarnation of Kras Mazov and art cop, is one of the many possibilities where gathering and putting information together would be… secondary, to say the least.
Just put your points in Drama or Inland Empire, and dull concepts like “reality” will be quite irrelevant for our good detective (much to Kim’s stoic chagrin). 🤷♂️
Stuff about the setting that I learn from the characters. Perhaps you have better memory than me.
Steam has notes built in
This is great to know. I need to see if Steam accepts my copy of the game, for which I didn’t pay to the company after what they did to the developers.
You can add any game to Steam and play it through it. Just add the exe as a non steam game.
You must have a better memory than me
I wouldn’t be so sure lol… The game has some built in “mission” stuff, and I’m sure I probably accidentally went to the same place a couple of times when trying to figure out how to progress, but never felt the need to write anything down. I found that the dialogue itself was usually good enough to remind me of anything important I might need to know for the current conversation
It’s just that I made a resolve recently-ish that I need to properly get into stories in games. Unlike back in the day, when I played through ‘Half-Life’ 1 and 2 and gathered pretty much nothing about the plot. ‘Disco Elysium’ seems to be the type of a game where a lot of the story is in the details dropped by the characters, reading materials, etc.
I’ve been recently replaying the original ‘Deus Ex’, and had Denton crawl around every level for hours, reading each newspaper and poster he comes across. The papers do in fact frame the main story, clarifying the relations between factions and such.
An extreme case of this is apparently the ‘Elder Scrolls’ universe, with which the community gathered sizeable lore and history that goes several layers deep. I’ve never played the games (perhaps for the best), and only happened upon a tangential discussion about this, but the impression was that they’re deciphering it like ‘Ulysses’.
I kept dying. And I couldn’t figure out how anyone dies in a narrative game. I couldn’t really figure out how to play the game and gave up after dying 2x in the same conversation.
I’m still so confused how one dies from conversation.
Instead I watched a video about the game.
I play a lot of games but nothing like this one. I wanted to like it but I’m too dumb to figure out the mechanics. And I even tried watching videos and found them convoluted and confusing.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - the disrespect for player’s time is actually insane, never seen anything like that before or since. Hundred endings which should have been like 30 tops with a decent quality control. 100 days which should also be 30 tops for each ending.
I really wanted to get to that one cool ending, but you have to play through who knows how many stupid filler routes to unlock it - I just couldn’t do it.
Don’t get me started on the day-to-day in the game: the repetitive slow-ass animations for every day, you having to go through motions to skip every day. And battles… Even when “skipping” them you spend literal minutes. Like why… And so many times you can’t even skip them.
But what really soured everything for me is the final battle in that one ending.
spoilerThat one super climactic battle, where your entire team stands together against the strongest foe yet, without the respawn ability or the healer. By juggling my squad, I avoided any deaths before accomplishing the goal for the battle. I thought that I would get a cool ending due to me trying hard to keep everyone alive. But then enemies (which constantly respawn) receive a power-up which makes them one shot my guys. Well, ok, I thought, maybe I can save some of them. By using placeable tools and overpowered protagonist, I kept some of my team alive while the timer for the battle went down steadily. Enemies kept spawning, but I kept some of my guys alive. The timer went down to zero, I was relieved, but then apparently that was a lose timer? Apparently, to win you HAVE to get your entire team dead? If you struggle as hard as you can to keep even some of them alive - you insta lose? But then if you win like you were supposed to (by killing your entire squad), the place blows up anyway killing everyone including the protagonist? That is actually insane. How did anyone come up with something like that…
It’s okay, but it’s a far cry from giving me the feelings of a cyberpunk world in my opinion and I’m a massive fan of blade runner and the like.
Why am i spending so much time wandering at the street level where everywhere just looks and feels the same. Travelling is so boring.
And the voice acting of V (I played female) is so overreacted, it’s one of the cringiest performances in gaming, considering it’s meant to be all serious and whatnot.
Why am i spending so much time wandering at the street level where everywhere just looks and feels the same.
What game are you fucking playing? “Looks and feels he same”!?
What are you even going on about? Every neighborhood, every nook and cranny, looks and feels different and has it’s own personality and story to tell!
Night City is the real protagonist of the game! I could spend hours upon hours just walking those streets, experiencing the city (and have), and I’m far from the only one…
And the voice acting of V (I played female) is so overreacted, it’s one of the cringiest performances in gaming
I’m sorry, what? Cherami Leigh got a well deserved BAFTA nomination for that performance!
(Lost to Laura Bailey for her work as Abby on The Last of Us Part II.)
What, were you playing with your eyes closed while listening to something else…?
To me every nook and cranny just looks bland with nothing to do there. Everywhere just had the same sidewalks and railings. There’s no way i could ever navigate that game without waypoints.
And with the acting the emphasis she puts on certain words in a sentence just don’t match the situation and the others she’s talking to, and it feels like she swaps between extreme emotions on the same dialogue and it’s like tonal whiplash to me. There was no nuance to lay in between, and nothing to unpack for the listener. You know when she’s angry because she has her 110% angry voice on and so on.
Unless the situation is heightened and dire, it just never fit in my opinion. Her performance fits a stage play more than what’s meant to be an immersive video game in my opinion.
Jackie’s and Keanu’s voice acting though was stellar.
My problem with Cyberpunk is it feels like all style and no substance. Night City is probably the best looking city I’ve ever seen in a game. The world designers did a phenomenal job with the visuals and atmosphere.
But it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough to do in the city or ways to interact with it or the NPCs. There should be more buildings you can enter and more activities to do. For me that’s what sets GTA and Red Dead apart from Cyberpunk. They have much more to do when you’re not on missions.
To be fair style over substance is one of cyberpunk’s (the style, not specifically the game) main design philosophies…
But yeah, sure, the game could stand some more fleshing up. Most games could.
That said, there’s a lot of stories going on in Night City that you won’t get through quests, but are told bit by bit through messages, notes, minor encounters, and environment design… more than in most similar games I’ve played.
Would it be nice to be able to enter every building, take a job at any random hot dog stand, ignore the quests and, I don’t know, infiltrate Biotechnica and leak all their ugly business to the world…? Sure, but that’s not something V would do (without getting paid), especially once they’re on a timer, the engine probably wouldn’t be able to support, and, most importantly, we’d still be waiting for the game to come out.
This is something that still disappoints me despite all the updates made to add immersion. The street food vendors just kind of hang out and stare at you. That and how every vendor interaction is just popping open their inventory and grabbing things.
I remember Postal 2 having a really clunky attempt at customer to vendor speech interactions where both were NPCs. Not as cool as a ridable metro system, but still.
The game is definitely too sparse and spread out. It should’ve taken more inspiration from the likes of yakuza than gta and made a smaller but more dense world to play in where every nook and cranny ACTUALLY meant something rather than giving the illusion of doing so.
Agreed. I have bounced off this game a few times for similar reasons. For a game that is about a cyberpunk future, it felt so much like a gta clone. Having played the ttrpgs, I think I just have a different version of the world in my head, and the games version just feels off.
Yeah seriously, V gets so worked up over fucking everything and I just couldn’t give a fuck. Calm the fuck down and take your Xanax, V. She’s stressing me out over nothing.
After Jesse died my motivation to continue dropped off a cliff. All the other characters are so boring and uninteresting. I cringe everytime johnny silver hand shows up. Also the driving and gunplay feels really really bad. Its got skyrim-like clunkiness without the flexibility and interesting world to make it worth while.
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Aktywne